Strawberry Almond Muffins - Strawberry #2

It was one of those hungry afternoons again.

I rumaged the fridge and saw this box of strawberries bought 2 weeks before and still looking pretty good untouched under the cling wrap. Then I took out some milk, ground almond and few eggs and this and that and some muffin liners recently given to me by fellow blogger HKChoo. I started baking muffins without a recipe.

As always, muffins taste best made with soured milk, buttermilk or yogurt. Not ordinary milk, blekkk! That's too dense and heavy. I was lazy to cut up a lemon, seemed wasteful, and so I thought, why not use balsamic vinegar to sour the milk, since it goes well with strawberries. And I also used ground almonds to further lighten up the texture.

40 minutes later, a delicious tea time treat was sinking into our teeth. Texture was light and moist, bursting with strawberry flavour. Lydia ate 3 in a row and Lyanne as usual ate but dug out all the strawberries. Lydia gladly took everything she dug out, LOL. I know many don't like to eat muffins because it tastes sticky and floury, no no, not this one.

Strawberry Almond Muffins

Recipe source: WendyinKK
Makes 12

Dry ingredients
200gm plain flour
1 tsp baking power
1/3 tsp baking soda
50gm ground almonds
120-150gm sugar (depending on the tartness of your strawberries)

Wet ingredients
60gm butter, melted
140gm milk
1 Tbsp Balsamic vinegar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract

200gm strawberries, cubed

1. Preheat oven to 160(fan)/180C. Line a 12 hole muffin pan.
2. Put balsamic vinegar into milk and stir. Let it sit while you do the rest.
3. Sift flour with baking powder and baking soda. Then mix with ground almonds and sugar. Set aside.
4. Combine butter, soured milk (2), eggs and vanilla extract. Gently beat to combine.
5. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour the egg mixture in. Gently stir to combine. When the batter isn’t totally smoothed out, pour in the cubed strawberries and give it a few folds.
6. Divide batter equally into the 12 lined muffin holes.
7. Bake for 25 minutes or until done.

Muffins are one of the easiest things to bake, and if I were to grade it's difficulty level in a scale or 1-10, it's a 1. There's not much technique involved with baking muffins, as long as you've got the ingredients properly measured.The most common error I know is "Stirring too much", or using the mixer all the way and beat it for few minutes. No no no, There's no bicep work involved at all. Even kids can do it. The key to making a good muffin is stir until just combined.  The more you stir, the flatter the muffin will be and the tougher the texture will be. Less is best with this.